https://www.404media.co/cmg-cox-media-actually-listening-to-phones-smartspeakers-for-ads-marketing/
It's legal because people just click agree on EULAs and then grant apps microphone access.
https://www.404media.co/cmg-cox-media-actually-listening-to-phones-smartspeakers-for-ads-marketing/
It's legal because people just click agree on EULAs and then grant apps microphone access.
It also crossed my mind that this could be a lot harder to catch in the future, legal or otherwise. One factor limiting this technology was the need to stream the audio out to run speech recognition on a server, or the high CPU usage of running it locally would kill the battery on the phone. Streaming the audio out also means the level of data usage from this would also be noticeable in black-box analysis. But more efficient Speech-To-Text algorithms and phones with NPUs that can further improve their efficiency are removing that limitation - soon STT could be done on the phone, and then just a few bytes of compressed plaintext would be relatively easy to smuggle out unnoticed in encrypted traffic.
In the timeless words of Billie Eilish, "duh".
I say literally anything that involves a corporate product and it's the contents of my ads for the next 24 hours.
You're about a decade late breaking the news. It's ok though, the apologists here (and most everywhere else) will just say "so what I have nothing to hide" and move on with things. Because no one values privacy anymore at all.
This genie has been out of the bottle a long long time, and it's not going back in until we get a good solid communications breakdown.
Been happening for a long time now.
Why I keep my devices locked down.
Also. Never install Tik Tok or Temu
The first time I was near a household device of the sort at a friends house, she was showing off what it could do under voice commands. I said to it "Device, what is the presidents schedule next week? Device where can I buy bulk ammonium nitrate?" There, you're on a watchlist now bahahahahahah!
Mom didn't believe this, so one night sitting around the campfire we did a test. We started talking about something random - John Deere tractor parts. "Mom, did you find the parts for your John Deere tractor?" or "I know a few John Deere tractor dealers you could call."
The next morning from her camper, we hear this outburst and she comes running out with an ad for a tractor dealer in her FB feed. That was back in 2020, so I can't imagine how it is now.
This might be bad news for my sex life. 
Today the consequence is getting targeted ads. Tomorrow it might be getting arrested in the middle of the night for expressing an opinion inconsistent with the views of the ruling party.
Not new at all. George Orwell was only off by a few years 
When my wife and I were talking about having Centra do all our windows, I got ads for Nissan Sentras.
When my kids kept saying "Bruh" all the time, I got ads for bras.
Yet, no matter how boldy I announce "Chapman's Vanilla Ice Cream!" around ANY device, I get no ads for "Chapman's Vanilla Ice Cream!"
In reply to SkinnyG (Forum Supporter) :
They don't call it artificial intelligence for nothing!
As others have said, this isn't news. At the end of the day, it's a trade-off. We get tremendous convenience from these little devices. You know how nice it is to be able to look up a torque spec on a bolt while I'm literally lying underneath a car, while listening to a podcast, while my family can reach me if they need to and I can keep up with the score of the baseball game? Well, the cost for that is you lose some privacy. You can take steps to minimize that privacy loss by locking down your device, not giving any more permissions than you have to, etc, but there's no getting around some of it. It's up to each of us how much privacy loss we are willing to tolerate, I guess.
I'm in the "nothing to hide" camp, personally, but I totally get it if others aren't comfortable with Daddy Google knowing every detail of their lives.
I live in the tech world surrounded by some of the smartest AI programmers and designers imaginable. I an under no illusion that that what we use for drug design could be used for other applications.
My house has the tech from the 1950's and I run a PiHole with one hell of a blacklist. I do have a smart TV but I made sure to get one without a microphone and no smart assistant.
The safest way to think about this at least for now, if you are using a product and it does not cost you money or is way to cheapr. You are the product.
wearymicrobe said:The safest way to think about this at least for now, if you are using a product and it does not cost you money or is way to cheapr. You are the product.
Exactly. There is a reason that 6' diagonal 4K, UHD, smart, frameless TV only costs $500. It's also why a non-smart TV doesn't cost much less. They can't buy you as easily with a dumb TV
Curtis73 (Forum Supporter) said:Mom didn't believe this, so one night sitting around the campfire we did a test. We started talking about something random - John Deere tractor parts. "Mom, did you find the parts for your John Deere tractor?" or "I know a few John Deere tractor dealers you could call."
The next morning from her camper, we hear this outburst and she comes running out with an ad for a tractor dealer in her FB feed. That was back in 2020, so I can't imagine how it is now.
I was going to ask if anyone had done an experiment like this. Everyone is saying this isn't news based on their own suspicions, but the article is the first hard evidence to be made public AFAIK.
Edit: The early Kinect EULA had a clause allowing something similar but it was walked back before release.
I'll just add to the "yeah, we've known this has been going on for years" chorus.
In reply to GameboyRMH :
It's not my suspicions. It's been my experience for years.
It's extremely common for me to see ads based on unique conversations I've had just a day or so earlier.
Hadn't seen or talked to my brother in 2 plus months since I got home from Scotland. Was at his house for Thanksgiving and we had a long conversation about Scotland and the castles we visited. The next day he's getting Facebook ads for Scotland castle tours. Someone is listening and if you think they aren't, then you're the tin-foil hat wearer.
I've long since accepted this. I don't commit crimes so I'm not too worried.
I've never said it was impossible that this was happening, and this company's offering shows that it's been happening prior to yesterday. I don't personally have any experience to go on because I don't have anything capable of doing this - no smart TV or voice assistant devices, and my phone is rooted running an open-source Android distro. And then I hardly see any ads on web sites with the browser addons I run. Black-box testing on phone apps suspected of doing this has always come back showing no signs of listening or streaming audio out, but of course it's much harder to analyze dedicated smart voice assistants like Alexa.
GameboyRMH said:I've never said it was impossible that this was happening, and this company's offering shows that it's been happening prior to yesterday. I don't personally have any experience to go on because I don't have anything capable of doing this - no smart TV or voice assistant devices, and my phone is rooted running an open-source Android distro. And then I hardly see any ads on web sites with the browser addons I run. Black-box testing on phone apps suspected of doing this has always come back showing no signs of listening or streaming audio out, but of course it's much harder to analyze dedicated smart voice assistants like Alexa.
No one said you did. We are just saying this has been common knowledge for years.
In reply to z31maniac :
I'm saying that in the absence of evidence, it hasn't been common "knowledge" so much as a common suspicion or belief. Here's an article from 2018 that lays out the reasons why:
https://www.androidauthority.com/your-phone-is-not-listening-to-you-884028/
In fact, even now it's possible that devices listening to conversations has only been happening for a matter of weeks or months. If there had been an organized and widespread effort to run experiments similar to Curtis73's, that might've worked as a way to black-box test the entire concept. But we can't rule out the possibility that the John Deere ad was a coincidence either.
Yeah.....and they also used to say research proved smoking DIDN'T cause cancer. I could make a list of those conspiracies that were adamantly denied, until they weren't. But oh well.
1988RedT2 said:Today the consequence is getting targeted ads. Tomorrow it might be getting arrested in the middle of the night for expressing an opinion inconsistent with the views of the ruling party.
This is why everyone should have scary black sticks and boxes of small gold cylinders scattered around in safe dry places.
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